Keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:KI5WYVI3WGWSIGMOKOOOGF4JAE (think PGP key but modern and easier to use)

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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • which also references an effort to use the media to quietly disseminate Google’s point of view about unionized tech workplaces.

    Bogas’ order references an effort by Google executives, including corporate counsel Christina Latta, to “find a ‘respected voice to publish an op-ed outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like,” and urging employees of Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google not to unionize.

    in an internal message Google human resources director Kara Silverstein told Latta that she liked the idea, “but that it should be done so that there ‘would be no fingerprints and not Google specific.’”

    From the article posted by 100_kg_90_de_belin.

    Google seemingly does care about their internal image, so they will only make their actions obvious when they fire you for bogus reasons after wanting to join a union.
    Quite nasty in that they give you no hints about how extreme their efforts on this are. They monitor internal employee tools like they are cosplaying the NSA, but you wouldn’t know before you are fired out of the blue.


  • You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
    Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.

    In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.

    I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.



  • Yeah, for amateurs it’ll be a while longer for this tech to become easily available.
    Though It is also fundamentally fixable, you can take the output of your sensor and apply the same sort of logic to it as professional large telescopes. The blocking spots will be larger since the telescope will not correct for atmospheric distortions and likely be in a less favorable spot, but still you can do far better than throwing out entire frames or even entire exposures.
    It is ofc a much much larger ask for hobby astronomers to deal with this initial wild-west software mess of figuring all of that out.

    As for the RF mess, this is the first time I hear of that. It seems honestly kinda odd to me, we have a lot of frequency control regulations globally and I have heard SpaceX go through the usual frequency allocation proceedings. A violation of that would be easy to show and should get them in serious trouble quickly. Do you have any source on that?


  • Maybe to add a bit of general context to this, I am not an astronomer but I work in an adjacent field. So I hear a lot of astronomers talk about their work both in private and public.
    You don’t really hear them talk about satellites often. What from what I gather really wrecks astronomy is light pollution, which has been doubling every few years for a while now and is basically caging optical astronomy to a select few areas.

    The worst thing for astronomy in the last century has probably, ironically, been the invention of the LED.

    The satellite streak thing is probably a minor point, where newspapers caught some justified ranting of astronomers and blew it way out of proportion.


  • Wrecking is not really the right term.
    It is causing work for astronomers, and wrecking very few older systems, but generally it is an issue you can work around. I.e. something temporary. What you usually see in my experience of the field is you have some of your work degraded by satellite streaks, which are about 2x more common since starlink, and you understandably complain at starlink. And then get around to coding up a solution to deal with the streaks, spend another few runs until it about works, and eventually forget this was ever a thing.

    In more detail, the base issue is, that you are taking an image, with probably minutes or hours or days of exposure, and every satellite passing through that image is going to create a streak that does not represent a star. Naturally that is not good in most cases.
    The classic approach here, because this issue has existed since before starlink satellites, is to - depending on frequency and exposure length and your methodology - either retake the entire shot, or throw out at least the frames with the satellite on it, manually.

    The updated approach is to use info about satellite positions to automatically block out the very small angle of the sky around them that their light can be scattered to by the atmosphere, and remove this before summing that frame into your final exposure. Depending on methodology, it might also be feasible to automatically throw away frames with any satellite on them, or you can count up which parts of the image were blocked for how long in total and append a tiny bit of exposure only to them at the end.

    To complicate this, I think more modern complaints are not about the permanent constellation satellites but those freshly deployed, that are still raising their orbits. Simply because their positions are not as easy to determine, since their orbits are changing. So you need to further adapt your system to specifically detect these chains of satellites and also block them out of your exposures.

    The issue here is that you need to create this system that deals with satellite data. And then you need that control over the frames in your exposure, which naturally does not match how exposure used to work in the olden days of film, but to my knowledge does work on all “modern” telescopes.
    My knowledge here is limited but I think this covers about 30-40 years of optical telescopes, which should largely be all optical ground based telescopes relevant today. Further, you probably do need to replace electronics in older telescopes, since they were not built to allow this selective blocking, only to interrupt the exposure.

    In summary, not affected are narrow fov modern optical telescopes, and in general telescopes operating far from visual frequencies.
    Affected with some extra work, would be some older narrow (but not very narrow) fov telescopes, as you now have to make them dodge satellites or turn off shortly, when previously you could have just thrown away the entire exposure in the rarer cases you caught a satellite. This would be software only (not that software is free).
    Modern wide fov telescopes might need hardware upgrades or just software upgrades to recover frames with streaks on them.
    Old wide fov telescopes may be taken out of commission or at least have their effective observation times cut shorter by needing to pass out on more and more exposure time over satellites in the frame.

    It is a problem, yes, but in my understanding one that can be overcome, and is causing the main annoyance and majority of its issues while the number of satellites is increasing, not after they have been increased.
    I don’t know of a single area of ground based astronomy that couldn’t be done with even a million satellites in leo.



  • That isn’t really going out of your way, it is the base mode of how the fediverse works. Looking at something on a different instance.
    Plenty of people just use mbin and see this, without any action at all.
    The point is that as it stands right now, there are already basically no restrictions. The only thing perhaps missing is the knowledge that you can simply copy paste a link into fedia or another mbin instance to view upvotes.

    You can open an issue on mbin about it, to restore a semblance of restriction. But currently as it stands, all restrictions are about as fallen as they could be.

    You can ofc argue that we shouldn’t open another equivalent hole in lemmys webui and api, so that you can in the future remove the ability from mbin.

    I would in turn argue that this system has always been egregious, and that in the same sense as banning encryption you never hit those you want to hit using incomplete restrictions. Regular users are led to believe their votes are private, while the worst dataminers or trolls will always have their instances to query all of that info.
    And how could you inform people that their votes are public without at the same time telling them how to get access to that info?

    If mbin removes the info, you will get another fediverse software showing it. You will get fediverse activity pub log info pages, specific vote info pages, it will never end.
    Has reddit ever managed to kill the 200ᵗʰ removeddit clone?

    Please instead put your effort into changing the way lemmy federates, the only way to fix this is to make vote details private, between only a select few instances. An mbin dev in the other thread mentioned PeerTube as an example implementation where you could remove vote details like that.


  • This would solve some of the problems. If only 2 instances know about the votes, post instance and sublemmy instance, you can reasonably expect to get most instances to never release that info. It would allow either the sublemmy or post instance to manipulate around in the votes, but most manipulation would be detectable by the respective other instance.

    It would open the door however to manipulating around with internal posts made from the instance in a sublemmy on the instance. And it would allow the post instance to drop votes selectively, though I think that is possible currently all the same.

    Votes being sent to both the sublemmy and the post instance simultaneously would make manipulation a lot harder. And for cases like internal posts, you could add another involved “judge instance” that receives the vote details directly from source, and is merely there to confirm the total. Instances that hand out non-independent “judge instances” could be labeled as untrustworthy in the lemmy community.

    So you end up with a list of instances per post that votes are reported to, to which you add the post instance, sublemmy instance, judge instance, and maybe some more.

    In terms of implementation, I think the activitypub protocol needs an origin for votes, right? I would say an instance can just report the votes coming from a stock of obviously fake accounts, like “masked_upvote_1” to _999999 … and “masked_downvote_1” to _XYZ.
    About the votes, I am not sure. It could be done as a lemmy-internal feature where lemmy instances and other instances knowing of the lemmy protocol send the info to all the relevant instances, while any votes from external instances only arrive at I guess the post instance and that then forwards it on to all other instances. This way the checking doesn’t work for software unaware of that lemmy specific vote implementation, but everything is still compatible.

    You could then even for those lemmy-external votes add an interface on the judge instance, that would confirm via pm if your vote has arrived.

    Do you think this could work?


  • In my case I would like them to be private, but currently they are not. I don’t think it is good to try to hinder the visibility into a fundamentally transparent system.

    I don’t see a technical way to make votes private either, that doesn’t prevent bad actor instances abusing the vote system. As an admin of an instance I could just add 5-10 votes to all of my interactions whenever I feel like it, and noone would be able to tell it didn’t come from legitimate users on my instance. The accounts of vote origin are needed as proof, hence moderators on lemmy having access to them.

    Do you perhaps have any idea how this could be accomplished?







  • I guess adb backup was before my time. I did use adb to transfer my apps when I last restored a twrp backup. In perhaps a similar manner to what that did, going by the name. But I did use adb root for that.

    Otherwise, I use it to set a lot of otherwise inaccessible settings, like making the back gesture a lot thinner than intended because my touchscreen can handle it, or forcing 120Hz everywhere. I can also set my dpi there without anoying apps.

    And ofc I use it to uninstall system apps I don’t need.

    After initial setup I do all of that in a root bash session in termux admittedly, but if I hadn’t rooted my device I would still want to do most of that using an adb shell, as most of it doesn’t require root (besides maybe the restoring backups part).

    I also use shell environment to semi-automatically transfer media files for certain processes, though I’ll probably move that over to syncrhing at some point.

    The main remaining advantage is the ability to automate things on my phone from my pc, I don’t see a lot of those as replacable unless my rom installs kde connect as a system app and they add an immense amount of functionality